LifeNews reports: Major conference themes included promoting sexual education and sexual rights for young people, establishing closer links between “sexual rights” and “reproductive health rights,” transforming traditional cultural and religious norms about human sexuality, and advocating for legal abortion on demand throughout Africa. Full article is here.

The Catholic Review: Public officials who openly support same-sex marriage cannot consider themselves to be Catholic, said an Italian cardinal.
“It’s impossible to consider oneself a Catholic if that person in one way or another recognizes same-sex marriage as a right,” said Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna.
The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reprinted a portion of a doctrinal note the cardinal released Feb. 14 concerning “Marriage and Homosexual Unions.” The note, which appeared in full on the archdiocese’s Web site, was aimed at helping enlighten Catholics in public office so that “they would not make choices that would publicly contradict their affiliation with the church,” he wrote. Read full article here.

Catholic Culture reports: In its new report “Stand and Deliver,” the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) is demanding that governments, religious institutions and society at large provide “comprehensive sexuality education” for children as young as ten years old. An IPPF report claims: “These rights are enshrined in various internationally agreed human rights convention and treaties, but – unfortunately – they are still not universally respected.” Read more about these sick enemies of children here.

The European Union is pushing hard to criminalize any opposition to homosexual behavior. There, apparently, was enough opposition in the parliament to force a postponement on the voting for the measure.

Zenit News interviewed Grégor Puppinck, director of the European Center for Law and Justice, who explained that the resolution “tends toward forcing opinions and consciences, imposing the idea that every type of relations — heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transexual — would be equal from the point of view of nature and morality.”

Puppinck explained the erroneous philosophy underlying the resolution: “Human sexuality, like every voluntary activity, has a moral dimension: It is an activity that involves the individual will at the service of an end; it is not an ‘identity.’ “In other words, it pertains to act and not to being, even if homosexual tendencies could be profoundly rooted in the personality.” Read full article here.

In light of the Rom Houben case, John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, was interviewed here with CNA.

With the invention of movable type, the Catholic, Johann Gutenburg printed a Latin Bible (and a Papal Indulgence), thus inaugurating the age of modern publishing in a very Catholic way. But his invention came in time for certain anti-Catholic forces to use it as a weapon against the Church and Catholic Spain. The “black legend” would not have been so widely diffused without Gutenburg’s achievement. Read More »

This code of conduct was extant at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), circa 1839–1997:

Without a strict observance of the fundamental Code of Honor [cf., that a gentleman does not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those who do], no man, no matter how ‘polished’, can be considered a gentleman. The honor of a gentleman demands the inviolability of his word, and the incorruptibility of his principles. He is the descendant of the knight, the crusader; he is the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice… or he is not a Gentleman. Read More »

Over at Chronicles, Dr. Thomas Fleming has a concise piece of writing that covers lots of ground on how pagans, old and new, consider the virtue of humility. He contends that the best of the Greeks and Romans had an elevated notion of the virtue, though one not supernaturally elevated as it is in Christianity.

The neo-pagans — moral slobs and effeminates unworthy of their ancient (supposed) forebears — ridicule the virtue. Read More »

CNA reports: A Missouri bishop has decried a “mentality of sterility,” naming it as a main factor in the present crisis of family life. He predicted that the renewal of the family and the Church would take place only when Catholics rediscover their “call to fruitfulness.”

Speaking at a Sept. 26 workshop for the assembly of the Missouri Catholic Conference, Bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau James V. Johnston said that all love “tends toward an incarnation” and requires the “daily cultivation of the soul” in holiness.  Read more here.

LifeNews reports: A pro-life watchdog group has uncovered evidence showing that student health insurance plan provided by Boston College, a Catholic school, includes coverage for “family planning services.” The Cardinal Newman Society has confirmed that includes birth control but it may include abortions as well.  Full article is here.